As Middle East-North African countries seek to reinvent their economics for a technology-forward future, one AI product in particular is seeing investor interest: chatbots.
Promoted by hopeful developers as a silver-bullet solution for multilingual customer service with relatively little overhead, AI-powered Arabic chatbots are finding a receptive audience in investors. In October, for instance, the Cairo-based technology company Nanovate received $1 million in a pre-seed round of angel investments to develop end-to-end Arabic solutions for Gulf Cooperation Council countries. That includes voice and chat AI bots, as well as customized enterprise solutions and automation systems.
“This isn’t just another AI startup—it’s a movement to put Arabic at the center of global innovation,” said Ahmed Gamal, co-founder and CEO of Nanovate, in a press release. “We’re building technology that understands us, speaks like us, and works for our region. With this round, we’re ready to take Arabic AI to a whole new level.”
It’s a big step for a company founded just nine months prior to that funding announcement. But GCC countries from the earliest planning stages counted on technology — and AI in particular — as a loadbearing pillar of their economic diversification and revitalization plans like Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.
“AI is no longer a luxury or an experimental endeavor — it has become the foundation upon which the next industrial revolution is being built,” wrote Dr. Majid Rafizadeh for Arab News. “Those who take the lead in developing AI will not only enjoy enormous domestic advantages but will also wield significant influence on the global stage, shaping how the technology is regulated, deployed and integrated into daily life.”
Another essential component of Vision 2030? Tourism. And that makes voice and chat bots even more attractive to enterprises throughout the region for its multilingual solutions. The ambition is to create an environment where non-Arabic speakers encounter as few friction points as possible, whether that be ordering from a menu or finding tickets to an upcoming sporting event or comedy show.
But chatbots are also envisioned as a possible solution for the Arabic-speaking world’s internal friction points, like the language’s numerous dialects and the culture’s strong religious underpinnings. Gizmodo, for example, reported in August that the Saudi Arabia company Humain launched a chatbot that not only operated natively on Arabic datasets but was also trained in “Islamic culture, values, and heritage” to avoid causing religious offense.
Powered by the Allam 34B large language model (LLM), one of the largest Arabic datasets assembled to date, Humain’s chatbot launched first in Saudi Arabia with plans to roll out across the Middle East.
“Allam 34B’s technology is proof that Saudi Arabia is shaping the future of AI on its own terms, with talent, IP and infrastructure rooted at home, and built for the world,” Humain officials said in a press release.
Arabic chatbots had to overcome several hurdles before developers readied them for primetime, not the least of them a lack of Arabic LLM datasets comparable to its English counterparts. However, 2025 saw rapid progress in assembling datasets sufficient to power native Arabic AI technology, clearing a major milestone in advance of the region’s economic goals for 2030